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Amazing Courtyard Roof Creates Boxes of Sky

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I love the roof of this courtyard home from Guadalajara, in Mexico.

Designed by DIPLAN, this extraordinary courtyard roof is the star turn in a very unusual home.

The house is designed around a central courtyard.

A skyway stair leads up to the roof terrace that circumnavigates the ‘sky boxes’.

The central courtyard is surrounded on the ground floor by the public spaces of the house.

While the bedrooms surround the upper courtyard on the second floor.

The huge shapes create pop art shadows analogous to the leaves of a tree.

By night, these now boldly lit shapes are even more intriguing.

You have to wonder what the neighbours think!

“We do not intend to invent, but rather to rediscover the old familiar courtyard of the typical old houses of Guadalajara,” say the architects.

They say the blue of the sky and the white of the stucco creates “a canvas for shadows always moving.”

The plain wall provides a permanent outdoor movie projection screen in the privacy of the courtyard space.

Light spills from the central courtyard into all of the relatively shallow surrounding spaces.

An intriguing kitchen skylight deliberately fosters the impression that its ceiling is as open to the sky as the courtyard’s.

A small kitchen garden brings some of nature’s abundance within the walls.

To protect from rain, the rooms opening onto the courtyard are glazed.

The interior facades facing the courtyard are carefully planned and geometrically ordered.

And the courtyard roof is an ever present reminder of what the architects describe as “a window to the clouds and stars. A facade parallel to the sky that others forget, but here is equally important to all. The face of the house that the angels see.”